Hannah Bendon

Welcome to Dunbar

Dunbar is a small town of 10,800 people in East Lothian. It is around 26 miles from Edinburgh and sits on the coastline to the north sea. The town has a rich history as a harbour and fishing community, but now faces some challenges presented by it’s rural/coastal location which makes employment more difficult for young people, with many leaving for bigger urban hubs.

Foraging

In order to accommodate the limited and fluctuating funds that the Ridge have and to embrace the concept of reuse within the community, I designed a phased approach to my design.

1. Make the site viable by using
only things found on site.

2. Transition the site into longer
term use using reusable objects/
building matter found around the
town.

3. Dunbar materials research and
reuse centre, made by engaging
the local timber and stone supply
chains.

In order the design the first two phases, I returned to Dunbar and foraged for reusable materials, recording and cataloguing what and where I found to give me an inventory for these phases. This exercise was pivotal in defining my attitude to both the site and materials and I learnt a lot about the town through walking around all of it’s closes, car parks, back alleys and yards which I could apply to the project.

Phasing

With my inventories aquired through the foraging task, I began combining them with my diagrammatic programme layouts to develop a series of anchors which would slowly develop into proper purpose-built buildings.

In the drawings, I labelled up all my proposals to show the material components, and inspired by Superuse Studio, I challenged my own preconceptions about purpose of materials, reusing stairs as shelves, doors as walls etc. It was a very interesting way to design and felt very tactile and grounded which I enjoyed.

For modelling, I limited my materials to what was in my own scrap pile for the first two phases, and tried to use the exercise to develop a character to each anchor which took something of it’s former self into it’s more sophisticated iterations. It was fascinating establishing what innate qualities they each had and definitely a design technique I would like to pursue again.

Brief

Inspired by investigations into local stone and timber procurement, as well as exercises in looking at lesser valued materials and spaces I developed a programme for a material reuse and research centre for The Ridge in Dunbar. This focused on using the outputs of the whole life cycle of traditional construction materials. 

I began to develop a series of diagrams which I set as rules for designing, including offsetting the existing ruins on site to accommodate the range of external, semi-internal and internal spaces which I identified in my programme. I also defined a direct and meandering path through the site to facilitate efficient and exploratory routes for the people and materials moving through.

Detail Development

Tectonics gave me the opportunity to resolve my design to a greater resolution than any previous design studio. Inspired particularly by my On Detail work and the Geddes Workshop, I was very excited to detail my proposal and made the thermal and building envelopes purposefully complex to accommodate the long thresholds in my programme and explore what could be done with timber and stone. I was also keen to make a breathable build up to properly look after the existing stone walls. 

I enjoyed making the detail and assembly expressive in the design, which formally uses quite a lot of traditional and simple shapes. For example, contrasting the roof and ceiling treatments between the hearth and lab. The former which has a sympathetic variation to the existing on the outside and more exciting internal envelope which pushes and pulls to receive light and the latter which is more expressive and unusual externally, reflecting it’s more experimental programme, but inside protects the existing (but structurally unviable) hip roof, acknowledging the traditional context the materials being researched come from.

Material Research

Beginning with our reading of ‘a carbon tectonic’ in ‘non extractive architecture’ and continuing in ‘material reform’ and ‘biogenic house sections’, I began to compare typical construction materials to lower carbon, renewably sourced ones. 

The complexity and carbon/energy cost of the extraction, processing and compiling of common components like concrete blocks or spray foam insulation made me very keen to avoid using them and look for better alternatives. Especially after visiting local stone and timber extraction/processing locations and witnessing the entire process take place in a very small vicinity, it made me truly appreciate the simple beauty and logic in these local vernacular materials.
 

I dug back into the local supply chains, keen to reach a full understanding of how innovative materials using waste from these procurement processing could take place and what these products could be used for.